Can the South African Communist Party’s history be an unwitting source of hope?

The unthinkable occurred in December 2024. The South African Communist Party (SACP) announced it would no longer remain subservient to the African National Congress (ANC). It would, for the first time, contest local elections – due in 2026 – against the ANC.

So unexpected was the event that it continues to attract a wide range of media coverage. This article seeks to extend the analysis provided by the editorial in Amandla! 99 and further developed by Brian Ashley on the website of Zabalaza for Socialism.

To better understand the enormity of the announcement, as well as its simultaneous limitations, along with the hope lying buried in both, requires a rush through the SACP’s history. This requires recognising, in the SACP’s own words, that, for most of its history, it has grappled with the “ever present question” of its relationship with the ANC.

A bald history

The baldest outline of the party’s history begins in 1921, with its formation as the first communist party in Africa. It also has the admirable distinction of being South Africa’s first non-racial political party; an honour all the more memorable in a society structured on statutory racism. The SACP’s Zulu name, Abantu abadla ndawonye, translates poetically in capturing the uniqueness of its infancy: “The people who eat together.” It is important to acknowledge this foresight, along with the bravery of what it meant to be a communist in a police state in which communists were the devil incarnate.

The new party’s first 25 years saw a series of policy shifts and zig-zags, usually dictated by the Comintern (the Third International). One of the first acts of the post-World War 2 National Party was to ban the SACP, in 1950, which, controversially, led the party to dissolve itself.

In 1953 the SACP was secretly reformed and opted to work with and through the ANC. The party broke cover only in 1961, a year after the ANC itself had been declared illegal. But, from 1953 to recently, it submerged itself into the ANC. During the particularly harsh period of the mid-1960s, it was the de facto ANC.

In 1962 it retrospectively provided itself with a theoretical basis for its relationship with the ANC – the theory of Colonialism of a Special Type. For the ANC this meant a joint commitment between it and the SACP for a National Democratic Revolution (NDR). Formally adopted by the ANC in 1969, the NDR was then seen as a seamless transition from national liberation to socialist liberation.

In the meantime, party leaders and members worked with the ANC and its allies, championing the civil rights and democratic values that were inscribed in the Freedom Charter of 1955. In 1961, an armed struggle was launched, led by communists and senior ANC members.

By the mid-1960s, militant resistance within the country had been defeated; the leaders of the SACP and the ANC were either imprisoned or in exile. During the party’s 30-year exile, it followed the logic of the National Democratic Revolution by allying itself unconditionally to African nationalism, in the form of the ANC. It’s the unconditional aspect that needs emphasising,

The Tripartite Alliance

In 1990, the party and the ANC were unbanned. Their leaders returned from exile to join leaders of the domestic resistance movement that had sprung up in the 1980s, including the leading non-racial trade union federation, Cosatu. The party and Cosatu formally joined the ANC in the Tripartite Alliance shortly before Nelson Mandela’s election as president of a democratic South Africa in 1994.

For the next 30 years the party remained chained to its position of subservience to African nationalism. It continued after the ANC’s embrace of neoliberalism in the early 1990s; it continued even though then president Thabo Mbeki – Mandela’s successor – made no secret of his antipathy to the party in the early 2000s; it continued while president Jacob Zuma – elected with the party’s full backing for his supposed progressiveness! – dragged the ANC deeper into corruption, economic decay and electoral decline.

It continued even while it formulated a swingeing critique of the ANC’s subservience to capital. It spelled out that the NDR “does not mean that the oppressed ‘people’ can be regarded as a single or homogeneous entity. The main revolutionary camp in the immediate struggle is made up of different classes and strata.”

It further described the sweeping measures taken by the ANC government to develop a particular “stratum” of the “revolutionary camp” – the African bourgeoisie. It described “emerging black capital” as “excessively compradorist and parasitic” on big capital. That the current president of South Africa, Cyril Ramaphosa, is a billionaire is entirely consistent with the party’s 2006 analysis. The African bourgeoisie have achieved their NDR. Their only current concern is to become even richer and larger. But, for the SACP, the fixed idea of an NDR moving seamlessly to socialism remains unchanged.

Failure to flex its muscles

This delusion substantially determined its approach to the negotiated settlement to democracy during 1990-1993. Rather than the peaceful transition being the usually understood miracle, it has become fashionable in some circles to see it as a sellout. This is a lazy judgement, even when not being an opportunistic one. The balance of forces both in South Africa and internationally – especially with the collapse of the Soviet Union – along with MK’s own weakness left little option, objectively.

But the SACP was still in a sufficiently powerful position for it to have had a significant influence on the transition. Consider, as a beginning, its at best timid response to:

• The ANC’s 1992 traveling to the US to learn from the World Bank, International Monetary Fund and major private banks the imperative of adopting neoliberalism.
• Being silenced by the ANC’s outrageous 1994 accusation of racism against some of the SACP’s leading white members, who were also ANC MPs. The reason? They questioned the ANC-dominated Parliament’s decision to increase the already obscene pay and perks paid by the previous apartheid Parliament to its MPs. Astonishingly, this resulted in them dropping the matter.
• The 1996 “non-negotiable”, neoliberal macro-economic policy, Gear, that Mandela imposed and that prevails to this day, which the SACP refers to as the heavily coded “1996 class project”.

The SACP and its leaders’ public stature at the time enabled a much more robust response to each of these three events (among others) had they so chosen. This stature can be seen from these examples:

• The people had unbanned the SACP long before its formal return to legality, with SACP banners and flags displayed at demonstrations prior to 1990.
• The popular response to the 1993 murder of its general secretary, Chris Hani, was the closest South Africa came to open civil war.
• Joe Slovo enjoyed enormous prestige after succeeding Chris Hani.
• The magic of the Mandela factor internationally, as well as the international hope embedded in the “new” South Africa, all combined to make possible a more principled opposition to some of the harsh realities of the Washington Consensus to which the Mandela government kowtowed.

How is one to understand this misplaced weakness that characterises so much of the SACP’s history? Space permits only the beginning of a complex answer:

It lost a constituency when what was seen as the established (white) working class defended South Africa’s racial capitalism rather than being the class that would overthrow it. This was a racial capitalism, which, mediated by their unprecedented access to the social surplus, turned them into junior members of the white ruling class. This precipitated their (effective) replacing of the class struggle with the national one.

World War 2 finalised the birth of the hitherto nascent African proletariat, but by then the SACP had already seen its future in the national struggle, not the primacy of the class struggle.

The subsequent delusion of the NDR reinforced the focus on the national struggle and its consequent subservience to the ANC.

The embourgeoisement of most of the SACP’s leadership – including Cosatu – strengthened the status quo.

To sum up: for just over 70 years – from 1953 to 2024 – the party defined its central task as supporting the ANC in its drive towards political power. After 1994, crucially, the SACP retained its by then customary role as an essentially ignored partner in the Tripartite Alliance. Its own identity and programme were submerged beneath those of the ANC. The party continued to believe that the ANC was still bound by the objectives of the original NDR, cherishing the fantasy that the now capitalist-committed ANC would somehow be an essential part of the transition to socialism.

Why the break now?

This brings us back to where I began: the SACP’s announcement in December 2024 that it was going to contest the next national election. The announcement astonished everyone, not least the SACP itself.

It was, for the SACP, a case of the single straw breaking the camel’s back. The long-suffering battered wife had eventually said: “Enough.”

So, what was the proverbial straw in this case? The ANC, having lost its majority in the 2024 election, chose to form a coalition government with the second largest parliamentary party, the Democratic Alliance (DA), as its main partner. I have argued elsewhere that the DA’s unapologetic endorsement of neoliberalism is the fundamental reason for the ANC’s choice. It is this choice that the SACP considers to be a step too far for its tolerance. Yet, this is the same neoliberalism the ANC has remained steadfastly committed to.

Holding together the current coalition government is the commitment to address poverty, unemployment and inequality, which they recognise as plagues. They also agree that economic growth is the only vaccine available – and the key ingredient is neoliberalism.

In practice, this means an increasing dependence on the private sector, which in turn requires being even more business friendly than ever. To mix metaphors, for the coalition government, the knight on a white horse is the investor.

But it was an ambivalent break. The party insists that it is not a divorce but “a reconfiguration of the alliance”. This is why, almost a year later, it still hasn’t said anything about any major policy differences with the ANC or given reasons why all left-leaning electors should vote for it. The point is that it can’t. To do so would put paid to any rapprochement with the ANC. And now the SACP’s National Chairperson, Blade Nzimande, has proposed in a “Discussion Paper” that the decision of the Special Congress should be reconsidered and changed in another Special Conference. Alas, space precludes further elaboration.

Paradoxically, the SACP’s inability to insist on the ANC unsaddling neoliberalism is a source of the long-promised hope.

Towards a new Left

I predict that the SACP’s inability to break with the neoliberal ANC means that, when the ravages of investor-friendly neoliberalism reach a critical point, enough members of the poor and unemployed will abandon waiting for the arrival of the horse. Joining them, if my forecast holds, will be SACP members, in sizeable numbers – including some leading members – no longer willing to accept their party’s history of mistakes. Instead of the resignation that, for years, has been their daily bread, they will leave the SACP and join the new rider on a different horse.

The fragmented forces of the broad French Left set an example by forming a victorious united front against the anticipated victory of the neo-fascists in last year’s French election. South Africa’s innumerable Left organisations – all small and mutually hostile – might, likewise, form a united front capable of attracting the long excluded, though often spoken about, unemployed 50% of the working-age population, along with the long-disaffected members of the SACP, trade unions and rank and file workers.

Such a united front – which might include some rank and file members of both the EFF and MK but not their far-from-Left leaderships – depends, crucially, on the Left’s ability to make as many people as possible aware that another world is possible. More important, still, is for them to know that they are the midwives in waiting for this better world.

Way back in 1927, the then ANC president, Josiah Gumede, voiced the passive despair of the African people with these moving words: “We have nothing and can only tell each other sad stories of our slavery. We have waited long for a liberator, but we don’t know where to find him.”

The best way to commemorate this plea for a liberator would be for the mass of South Africans to answer that they don’t need a Spartacus, an individual saviour. They are all Spartacus; they are all self-liberators acting collectively in an explicitly anti-neoliberal united front.

Yes, I might be dreaming. But who would have thought that Zohran Mamdani would be the elected mayor of New York – the capital of capitalism – despite a united ruling class campaign to portray him as a Jew-hating communist! DM

This article is co-published with the journal Amandla!